Theodor Adorno’s Force Fields and Camille Paglia’s Killing Fields

The majority of people don’t go around every day thinking about what art is. Few think about why the definition of art may change not only the way we think but also the way we act in the world. Today, I was surprised to hear, in a discussion between two very controversial voices in contemporary North American culture – Camille Paglia and Jordon Peterson – that what “post-modernists” and “post-structuralists” have done is destroy the meaning of art by turning it into “text” or dissecting it (9:37). The “true” meaning of art, says Paglia, has been distorted by the academy because it is populist, not elitist.

For Paglia, not only post-modern artists but also academics (who she calls “academe” – suggesting something snobby and elitist), who go “hand in hand” with the artists – are a “fraud” because they believe that opposition to history and culture (via the avant garde) is alive when it is – post-Warhol – dead. They act “as if” they are like these avant garde heroes, but they are really “infantile.” Paglia suggests that the real art and left politics is populist and – together with Peterson – attacks the postmodern academy. All of this name calling, note, is done over the meaning of art and leftism. Art is not, rages Paglia, superior to the people. It’s the other way around. Postmodern art, which for Paglia also implies the academy, is the problem. Paglia suggests, in her rhetoric, that it must be exposed as a fraud by the voices of the people (such as Paglia, herself, and Jordan Peterson):

It’s madness…teaching that everything is mediated by language…even gender….it’s absolute madness. I am teaching people whose majors are ceramics, are dance…who understand the world in terms of the body…sensory activation…Everything about Andy Warhol was ‘wow’ it was about admiration. What happened immediately after that, in the 70s was a collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism….this happened in the art world…there was an utter misunderstanding of culture in the art world…Oppositional art in my view is dead. What postmodernism is…is a pathetic attempt to continue the heroism of the avant garde. The avant garde was genuinely heroic… Pop art killed the avant garde… It (the postmodern art world) feels it must attack, attack, attack the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. From the moment Andy Warhol….embraced the popular media – instead of having the opposition to it, which the serious arts had – that was the end of oppositional art…. So we have been going on like this for 50 years…. Postmodernism and academe going hand in hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art in galleries everywhere…. With this idea that the art world has a superior view on reality. Authentic leftism is populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion… in an openness and brusqueness of speech. Ok. Not this fancy contorted jargon of this leftism of academe who are frauds.

When Paglia takes aim at postmodernism, it seems like she is also taking aim at the 20th century European thinker, Theodor Adorno’s reading of art and culture. After all, he sees art as going against the grain of history and culture. It is different and, for him, better because it is a form of critique (albeit momentary) when it doesn’t proclaim itself as art but something other.

In his book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that “art is no fixed set of boundaries but rather a momentary and fragile balance, comparable to the dynamic balance between the ego and the id in the psychological sphere. But artworks become bad only because they objectively raise the claim of being art”(300). According to Adorno, surrealism had potential but it failed because it was rejected by “an anti-art deportment that never achieved its goal of becoming a political force.” He suggests that the rejection of surrealism by this anti-art deportment was a mistake because it, itself, failed to become a political force.

The “force field” – created by art – is something to be reckoned with. The immanence of art, its totality, creates a force-field.:

All the same, origin is not radically external to the work. It is an implicit part of the artworks that they are artifacts. The configurations sedimented in each address the context from which it is issued. In each its likeness to its origins is thrown into relief by what it became. The antithetic is essential to its content. Its immanent dynamic crystallizes the dynamo external to it and indeed dow so by virtue of its aporetic character. Regardless of their individual endowments and contrary to them, if artworks are unable to achieve their monadological unity, they succumb to real historical pressure; it becomes the force that inwardly dislocates them. This is not the least of the reasons why an artwork is adequately perceived as a process. If however the individual artwork is a force field, a dynamic configuration of its elements, this holds no less for art itself as a whole. Therefore art cannot be understood all at once, but only in terms of elements, in a mediated fashion. One of these elements is that by which artworks contrast with what is not art; the attitude toward objectivity changes. (301)

The force field is inherent in this “dynamic configuration of its elements,” and this dynamic is what contrasts with what is not art. If, on the other hand, it “succumbs to real historical pressure,” than the force of history “inwardly dislocates it.” In other words, the force of history can destroy the force field of art.

And perhaps that is what distinguishes Adorno from Paglia. He would argue that it is only through the opposition to history that art can be a force field – that is, a true force, with a dynamic of it own. But the anti-art movement, which fails to become political, suggests that the killing field wants to destroy the force field. The people – history – can and, as Paglia suggests, should dislodge it. Because art – and by implication – academia have become a negative force that goes against the grain of true leftist history, which is populist, it must be derided and destroyed.

What Paglia suggests is that since postmodern art is not from the people but from the elite, it must be exposed as a fraud. Only true art, in other words, comes from the people not from academics or artists. But will the people produce a force field that goes against the grain of history or will history (synonymous with the people) – embodied in, as Paglia says, in the “working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion…in an openness and brusqueness of speech” – destroy “art”? Will the killing fields destroy the force fields?